“To this, Mr. Pringle, who was himself for six years a resident of the English settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, adds, ’The writer of this article has seen, in the course of five or six years, as great a change upon English ladies and gentleman of respectability, as that described to have taken place in Donna Sophia d’Almeydra; and one of the individuals whom he has in his eye, while he writes this passage, lately confessed to him this melancholy change, remarking at the same time, ’how altered I am in my feelings with regard to slavery.  I do not appear to myself the same person I was on my arrival in this colony, and if I would give the world for the feelings I then had, I could not recall them.’”

Slaveholders know full well that familiarity with slavery produces indifference to its cruelties and reconciles the mind to them.  The late Judge Tucker, a Virginia slaveholder and professor of law in the University of William and Mary, in the appendix to his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, part 2, pp. 56, 57, commenting on the law of Virginia previous to 1792, which outlawed fugitive slaves, says: 

“Such are the cruelties to which slavery gives rise, such the horrors to which the mind becomes reconciled by its adoption.”

The following facts from the pen of CHARLES STUART, happily illustrate the same principle: 

“A young lady, the daughter of a Jamaica planter, was sent at an early age to school to England, and after completing her education, returned to her native country.

“She is now settled with her husband and family in England.  I visited her near Bath, early last spring, (1834.) Conversing on the above subject, the paralyzing effects of slaveholding on the heart, she said: 

“’While at school in England, I often thought with peculiar tenderness of the kindness of a slave who had nursed and carried me about.  Upon returning to my father’s, one of my first inquiries was about him.  I was deeply afflicted to find that he was on the point of undergoing a “law flogging for having run away.”  I threw myself at my father’s feet and implored with tears, his pardon; but my father steadily replied, that it would ruin the discipline of the plantation, and that the punishment must take place.  I wept in vain, and retired so grieved and disgusted, that for some days after, I could scarcely bear with patience, the sight of my own father.  But many months had not elapsed ere I was as ready as any body to seize the domestic whip, and flog my slaves without hesitation.’

“This lady is one of the most Christian and noble minds of my acquaintance.  She and her husband distinguished themselves several years ago, in Jamaica, by immediately emancipating their slaves.”